• DON’T YOU HATE the days you’re
staring endlessly at your screen and
have no clue what to trade? To get
ideas, you visit your favorite chat
room, and you listen and read as much
as you can to see if anything gets you
excited, but still, nothing.

We all go through this from time to
time. And since you can’t predict the
future, there must be something out
there that brings clarity to your trading
mind. Lucky for you, you have charts.
They may not be able to show you what
a stock will do, but they’re good at
capturing all that information you hear
and read about into one price bar, like
a snapshot in time. And that price bar
could reflect any time period—a minute,
an hour, a year.

Think of charts as silent storytell-ers. As you watch them unfold duringthe trading day,they have a lot tosay as they evolveand reveal thingsyou didn’t knowbefore the lasttick. You can seewhere price is rel-ative to past highsor lows, past sup-port or resistancelevels, and what’strending or stagnant. You can add aton of things to charts—indicators,trendlines, arcs, patterns with strangenames, and more. And with the rightamount of information, charts can begreat visual tools for traders.

Our cover feature, “Three Indicators to Check Before the Trade” (page
16), shows you one way to choose the
right mix of indicators that’ll indicate a
A picture is worth a
thousand words …

trend’s direction and momentum. Yes,
there is a method to the madness!

Once you’ve figured out which wayand how quickly prices are moving,your next step is to figure out what typeof strategies to trade. You have severalchoices there as well, some simplerthan others. If you’ve been trading op-tions for a while, you may want to ven-ture into something new. In “Pile OnWith Multi-Spread Organic Trading”on page 24, find out how you can turna strategy you often use into somethingelse by overlaying another strategy.

Trying new things can be nerve-racking, but it could make your trading
life more interesting, too. The next
time you’re stuck not knowing what
to trade, try something different with
your charts.

Happy trading,

Kevin Lund
Editor-in-Chief, thinkMoney

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